I’m not a small girl.
Five 10 in flats, sturdy legs, broad shoulders. On land I can be clumsy, uncoordinated. When quite young I went to gymnastics: the head coach pulled my mum to one side and in a Gray’s Anatomy tone cast his eyes downwards and whispered, “we don’t think she’ll ever walk on the beam.”
But in the water? In the water I can fly. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved being immersed in baths, showers, pools. I learned to swim young, taught at Herringthorpe leisure.
For those of you who remember the Brittas Empire, the Brittas Empire had nothing on Herringthorpe. We had the tipsy receptionist who fell in the main pool, the group baptism in the baby pool, the smell of chlorine, vinegar, piss and booze and an adults only pool side ‘beach’ where they could smoke a fag on the loungers after a half hour on the sun bed.
There was a wave machine a steep slide and the most peculiar addition of a sea monster made of lumps of round concrete: fall off to the right, smash your head in in the shallows, fall to the left likely drown legs akimbo head underwater.
I progressed well at swimming and also I loved it. Soon after, I joined a small club in Chapletown – a town between Rotherham and Sheffield and close to Harley where my Nanna and Grandad retired initially. After morning training, we’d got to Nanna’s for porridge before being dropped off at Junior School. After evening training we’d stop at the chippy, “Chips wrapped with scraps please. Lots of vinegar.”
I broke a few records, won a few medals and it was decided I should move to a bigger club with a more serious vibe. Rotherham Metro here I come. Transitioning to Rotherham metro came at the same time as transitioning to Secondary school. Neither went that well. But I swam well, made the squad and pulled my weight in the relays.
Through Rotherham metro, doors were openned to foreign exchanges. I stayed with a family in Holland a couple of time and once we went to Canada. In Canada, I ended up staying with one of the wealthier families with basement rooms and a swimming pool. It was autumn and crisp and blue skied and red mapled and beautiful.
They showed us Niagra falls, in return we showed them Derbyshire in the rain. I am not sure if was a fair swap but we all got on well.
For a while I was doing great, shaving time off my 100ms, heading towards making the nationals. Soon though, something went wrong. Each training sessions I was lapped…and lapped….and lapped again. Each race I’d go slower than the year before. The harder I trained the slower I got.
Looking back, given my never ending puberty, it seems likely I was trying to grow but was training too hard for that to happen. I was constantly exhausted and constantly starving. I remember creeping downstairs in the middle of the night scavaging for food and the only thing I craved was sugar sandwiches.
By the time I was about 15, I dropped into a squad for people-who-fancied-still-swimming-but-couldn’t-be-arsed-with-training-8-times-a-week-plus-gym-sessions. There, I bumped into an old friend from Juniors, Stephen.
When we’d been at Juniors, Stephen and I were even…er….Stevens when it came to swimming. We knew this because back in the 80s Rotherham had numerous small swimming pools attached to community libraries. There was a sign at each pool saying that UB40s could go swimming for free and for a long time I was perplexed as to what the singers of the admittedly very catchy tune Red Red Wine had done to be welcomed into the 20 metre by 10 down Mowbray Gardens.
Because of the pools, all the schools could have regular swimming lessons and Stephen and I would go and race and he’d win all the the crawl and fly events and I’d win all the backstroke and breastroke ones. When I saw Stephen 4 or 5 years later, he beat me at everything, by miles. It drove me insane that I was born with this body that no matter how hard i tried I could never be as strong or as fast as I would have liked. On the plus side, a friend from that squad introduced me to a load of boys with strong, fast bodies and I soon came to terms with how things turn out.
At 16, training as a pool attendant seemed the logical choice. Being a lifeguard is surprisingly boring. Until it isn’t. The naughtiest child I have met to this day, f-ing, blinding, pelting off at speed when told off…but you couldn’t blow your whistle and shout ‘no running’ because he only had one leg. The naughtiest man I have ever met who turned up with his son and – to make his son laugh – decided to chuck everything in the pool: balls, floats, ropes, life rings. Even the spinal boards. Once, we found a bag of speed in the changing rooms. Once, I left the takings of the till on the desk behind the glass partition only for some kids to find a stick, hoik it out and nick the lot.
At uni, I tried to join the swimming club but it was a treck away and bars and booze beckoned. I did get a small tattoo of a dolphin in the crease at the top of my thigh and while I am bit over tattoos these days, I’m still quite fond of that.
A few years ago, we lived in the UAE for a little while. There were pools and laggoons and oceans and for a while, bouyed by the water and the likeminded people who joined me in it, I felt like myself and at peace with myself in a way I haven’t felt in years.
As for now? I don’t swim as much as I’d like these days and as a result my shoulders are seized up, my belly grows, my legs feel less fluid. My mental health could likely be better.
I miss it but something stops me. It’s all made into such a palarva isn’t it? Having to book. Having to have a padlock for the locker. Having to share the pool with kids having lessons cos every hour’s a chance to claw back some of the money that leisure centres drain out of depleted budgets. And after all that, the getting changed in the cold, the plasters on the floor, the wet toilet seats, the smell of wee, to top it all off, to add insult to injury, there’s not even a bloody chance of bumping into UB40 once you get there.
Cogito Ergo Mum 